Here we are at the end of another year.  This year has gone very quickly!

It has been a year filled with many challenges and also beautiful things.

As nature sheds its leaves, resting and in preparation for a new beginning next year,

I hope that this coming year will be even better, and that we can each, in our own way, make the world a better place.

Thanking all of you who take the time to read this blog and wishing you a very good holiday season and new year.

Snowy Peaks Jura Mountains, France

best wishes,
Nat Wildish, aka DweezelJazz

Last week I did six more watercolors for the Gex book, completing the paintings for two more pages and starting a couple more pages.

There are many walking paths  in the mountains and foothills just behind Gex and every once in a while there are signposts showing directions and, sometimes, distances or walking times.  Here’s one such sign (click on photos to see larger image):

Gex Country Walkway Signpost

A river runs through the lowest part of the town (as rivers often do) and right next to the river there’s a fountain. This is sometimes used by a nearby car repair shop to check where the holes are in punctured tires.  The river runs just below, to the right of the railing; the house on the right is on the other side of the bank.

Fountain Near River In Gex

Close to the fountain on the other side of the river, and on slightly higher ground, there are very old parts of the town that lead upwards behind the old town wall.  The next painting shows the view looking up one of the narrow staircases from the street.

Narrow staircase leading up to house in Gex

These last two paintings make up a page in the book.  The page is shown below; it’s a rough draft of the image layout just to give an idea of what it’ll look like.

Rough Image Layout Draft of Page in Gex Book

I’m painting whatever scene appeals to me at the time of choosing, so the pages aren’t being completed in book page order.  Higher up the town the streets are steep, and some are fairly narrow and are pedestrian walkways only.

View from Gex in direction of Le Saleve

Looking over the wall of one such walkway the view is expansive, looking out towards Le Saleve, which is also in France, but is on the other side of Geneva, Switzerland.  If you’d like to see more about Le Saleve you can see previous posts: A Car Trip Up Le Saleve, Part I and Part II.

This painting fits on the page of the Gex book shown below.  This week I’ll paint the other scene that you can see as a sketch on the right hand side of the page, showing a view from the town looking south down the valley towards Bellegarde.

Draft Image Layout for a page in the Gex book

I chose a couple of bright, colorful little paintings for the sheer fun of it.  There’s a very nice cafe on the main street in Gex.  Every weekend there’s a market on this street, so this cafe is very popular with the market stall keepers and customers alike.  There will be a couple of paintings, for the book, of both the inside and outside of this cafe coming up in the future. Their cups and saucers have always been a great source of fun.

Gex PMU cafe coffee cup

And there are often very interesting sugar cubes, bright and cheerful.

Sugar cube bowl at the Gex PMU cafe

These two paintings are arranged on a page to the left of the page that will show the inside of the cafe.

Draft Layout of Images on a page in Gex book

Stay tuned to DweezelJazz Art blog to see the painting of the inside of the cafe, and others, as the Gex book is being completed!

I have completed a set of watercolor paintings for a two-page spread in the book. It’s a book about the town of Gex, France, and will have a total of 82 paintings in it, including scenes of the town as well as the surrounding countryside.

I’ve completed 68 drawings for the book and have 14 left to do. Last week I chose a two-page spread at random and painted the scenes for it.

There are fields dotted round the outskirts of the town and many of them are filled with beautiful tall corn.

In amongst these fields are also many pastures where cows graze, and sometimes they’re provided with hay to chomp on, like this very young one.

There are many bright flowers growing alongside the country roads. One of these, the thistle, provides stunning color, like a tiny firework exploding in the grass.

There’s a story about these four cows and what they were looking at… but this will remain untold for now, so that there are fun things to look forward to when the book is finished and complete with text.

Outside some of the country homes, there are more cultivated flowers set close to the road, showing off their delicate finery.

Putting all these paintings together, below you can see what the two-page spread looks like with all the paintings set in place. (By clicking on any of the images in the post, you can see them in larger format.)

Stay tuned to DweezelJazz Art blog to see more paintings that will be in the upcoming book.

Wheat almost ready to harvest

It has been a long time since the last post here on DweezelJazz Art blog.  There have been a combination of things that made this so.  What started it was that we lost our Internet connection for six weeks.  Our Internet Service Provider, who will remain nameless here, upgraded their service, but unfortunately they lost our connection altogether and never found it again!  So we switched providers.  In France it takes a long time for a new provider to set up the line. But we’ve been back online for a few weeks now and everything is working very nicely.

Green Summer Countryside

We’ve had a very unusual summer here – it has rained so much that everything has stayed green and it looks like the high Alps in summertime.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  The air has been cleaned every few days by another downpour and lots of wind, but we’ve also had a lot of bright, shiny sunshine.  It has been idyllic.

Corn Field

We’ve watched and heard the sparrows nesting in the eaves of our house.  The swallows and house martins, also living around here, are cleaning up all of the mosquitoes in the area – we haven’t been bitten once at home!  The swallows are fantastic to watch as they swoop gracefully back and forth, nearly colliding with the walls when they get close to the house.  The roosters and chickens in the large open field next to us have been announcing themselves loudly and are a real joy to watch as they bound and run across the tall grass, always busy.

Jet D'Eau Geneva Switzerland

It has also been an eventful summer, as a result of something that happened way back in February.  I went to the dentist to have a fixed orthodontic retainer glued back on. (Visits to the dentist have taken me frequently into Geneva and so I’ve witnessed summer in town too, as you can see in the photos.)  This simple goal turned out to be far more involved than I at first thought.  The dentist took one look at me, asked me all about any symptoms I experienced and then he announced that he thought he might be able to largely remove those symptoms:  migraines, nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, extreme fatigue, difficulty breathing, lung discomfort, neck and back muscle cramps, lack of sleep, and so on.

And, to my utmost amazement, in addition to the removal of these symptoms, I found that I no longer had reactions to being around perfumes, cleaning products and other toxic chemicals I have hitherto found increasingly difficult to endure.  I didn’t rush out to put these things in my environment, but it was fabulous not to feel like someone had laid out kryptonite around me every time I went out somewhere.

Place du Bourg de Four, Old Town Geneva, Switzerland

I’ve lived with these difficulties all my life and had come to accept them as part of life, at least my life.  So it has been with amazement that I’ve discovered that these myriad symptoms are indeed entirely due to jaw misalignment.  I’ve learned a tremendous amount about this in the last months;  it hasn’t been easy and has taken a huge amount of thinking and observing on my part, all the while trying to learn fast enough so as not to fall back into the abyss of pain-ridden exhaustion.  Life rarely offers a magic bullet.  My situation isn’t totally resolved and I’m still trying to find out if there’s a long-term solution to correct the jaw alignment.

Parc des Bastions, Geneva, Switzerland

The great thing is that along the way, there have been times during the last months that I’ve been the most pain-free I’ve ever been – in fact, I didn’t know what it was like to be that pain-free – didn’t know what it was like to have energy, and long, deep nights of sleep.  Fantastic!  So I took advantage of it!

Looking up at back of Old Town Geneva from opposite the Parc des Bastions

In June I finished the Total Training Online Course on Adobe Dreamweaver, and within a couple of weeks I designed a completely new look for DweezelJazz Art site, with new galleries and descriptive content for the paintings.

Then I worked on a number of drawings for paintings in egg tempera, inked them…

Inked drawings ready to glue onto the tempered glass.

and then glued them onto tempered glass.

Drawings ready to be underpainted, and then prepped for painting with egg tempera.

As I was doing this, and also preparing some drawings for painting in watercolor, Tony came up with a brilliant idea: what about creating a book of paintings?  Well, I have wanted to do something of that kind for a long time, dreaming about it.  I decided to bite the bullet.  I chose the subject, in fact, if I survive the first book, I plan to do a series of them: each book dedicated to a town and area in the Pays de Gex, France / Geneva, Switzerland area.

I started with a plan to fill a 60-page book, large format.  So I created a storyboard for the entire book, including image sizes and placement.

Storyboard for the first book.

Then I started drawing and drawing and drawing.

A drawing for the book.

I’m including scenes in towns and in the countryside around them, so that the book will give the feel of the place as a whole.

This is what I call a "cow bus".

Quite often at the beginning of summer, you can see tractors hauling a trailer full of cows out to the fields, and again in fall taking them back to the warmth of the barns.  It almost seems like the cows are being transported to school or something, so I call it a ‘cow bus’.

I’ve completed 64 drawings and have 18 left to do.  Then, all I have to do is paint them! I’ll paint them probably using a combination of ink and watercolor.  And of course add text to accompany the paintings.

Sunflower

So, if you’ve managed to read this entire post and have reached this far: thank you!  Thank you for reading this blog, and if you’ve been a reader for some time, thank you for continuing to read DweezelJazz Art blog.  I don’t post as often as I used to because I’ve had to prioritize the precious commodity of time, but I do plan to continue posting and have some photos of pretty places and countryside ready for future posts.  I’m very happy if you find it interesting and fun.  Life is full of beautiful things, to cherish and enjoy, and I try to share a little of that here.

This sunflower, for example,  just wouldn’t pose correctly for the photo – I reckon it was a bit drunk out there in the fresh air – couldn’t focus on having it’s photo taken!  But it is beautiful, nonetheless.

A couple of evenings ago I noticed a few deer running down from the hills. This is a real event here because the deer are totally wild and wary of any human encounters – they are hunted here during the hunting season, unlike those around Shannon’s town. You can see lots about deer in Shannon’s blog “Chipper’s Alley“. I grabbed the camera and ran to the upstairs window.

Three deer crossing a field

There were three deer. Two of them were circling one another and playing in the snow, dashing here and there. The third hung back.

Two of the deer play in the snow

After jumping and generally horsing, or maybe I should say deering, around the two playful deer stopped and looked at one another. They moved closer.

Two deer together

Then, it seemed it was time to move on again, and all three made their way into the next set of trees and out of sight.

Three deer heading into the trees

Yesterday afternoon the sun came out and we went for a quick walk up the hill.

Snow in the Jura Foothills

Footprints made by critter in the Jura Snow

We saw lots of tracks, some clearly made by dogs, other that seemed to be made by deer and then this set, which we see very often. We’re guessing they’re made by a fox (we have seen a fox a few times near our place). Do you know what kind of tracks they are? I didn’t think to add something for reference of scale, but they’re a fairly small size.

We were the first ones to take the path up the hill, and it was so satisfying to trundle through pristine untrodden snow.

Jura Snow

I was wearing ski pants, leaving me at total liberty to lie down and roll in it! I always wanted to lay in a cloud… this is the next best thing. We had five inches of snow this morning and afterwards the sun came out even more gloriously than yesterday. The snow is so powdery and light that when we tried to make a snowman it wouldn’t adhere and we ended up with a very crumbly stalactite (oops, I actually mean) stalagmite.

We’re having loads of fun in the snow and the views are beautiful!

A pretty scene at the Piatto d’Oro, Switzerland, a restaurant very close to the Geneva airport.

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White and purple wisteria in the Parc des Bastions in Geneva, and Hermance, Switzerland, and Annecy, France.

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Mountains are made up of a myriad of living entities. It’s only reasonable that as a conglomerate they would appear to be living, almost breathing beings themselves.

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Spectacular summer storm clouds.

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Photos of flowers and amazing flower beds on the promenade along the Lac Leman in Geneva, Switzerland.

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